Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm still Melanie.
And today, we're joined by Wayne Denner entrepreneur and cyber safeguarding specialist. And we're talking about how to market online safety and birdseed, amongst several other random things. Welcome, Wayne
Hi guys, it's great to be on the podcast with you. Thanks for having me on as a guest. Really appreciate it.
Oh, we're so glad that you could finally find space in this in your very hectic schedule. So tell us. Well, we'll start with the cyber safeguarding aspect, because that's where I think most people probably know you from. So, like, we were just talking before we came on air, there's lots of breaches. Facebook has had their most recent one. What advice would you give people on that at the minute?
Well, actually, as you guys know, I'm going to go a little bit left field for a moment because a lot of people actually know me from my very early days of setting up and co-founding one of the first social networking websites in Ireland on a website called Outlastnight.com, which was in existence, pre days of weeble. In fact, it was weeble that social networking website in decline because people could suddenly start to set up their own social media profile and have their own personal account and upload their own photos. So they didn't really need to come to our website back in the late 90s anymore to teach them to view pictures from their nights out. They could just do that from their own weeble account. So a lot of people know me from that sort of life. Whatever, whatever. I was going around bars and nightclubs with not only myself, but we had a team of photographers that would go out and take pictures with very primitive, let's say, digital cameras and at the primitive digital cameras had those you know, they took actually AA batteries. They weren't like the digital cameras that you have today or indeed your smartphone. It was pretty raw stuff. And the camera was quite bulky and heavy. But nonetheless, it served the purpose where we used to go round bars and nightclubs and concert events and, you know, t in the park and Otha in the park and, you know, all those types of things that we used to capture footage mostly it was still photographs of people out enjoying themselves. And we would post them on our website every Monday morning and we would get an influx of traffic of people coming on to look out the images and see pictures of themselves in their local venues. That went really well for about three years. And back then, I was in my sort of early 20s, I think about in nineteen or so or thereabouts. And we ran that business for about three years until people came on the scene. How we generate or generate revenue back then was off the back of the split advertising. So I guess that's kind of where my online sort of experience kind of stamped out of. And that's kind of where things progressed on into and into the world of that I find myself in now. Fast forward 15, 20 years into the world of online safety, starting out really as a as a as a sort of a what was what's the correct word to explain it starting out as a bit of a sort of a give back to local schools. A teacher approached me and said, look, you know, a thing or two about the Internet and social media, what is ask.fm? And that's how long ago this was like people were asking me about ask.fm, which is, you know, still around. But, you know, most people really, you know, are using a multitude of social media platforms as opposed to just using that. But there was a lot of concerns and issues arising out of young people being bullied on the ask.fm platform, trust and safety issues as a result of people using the platform. And really, this school in particular at the time had some concerns and had some problems and says, look, when can you come into the school and can you give our parents a talking online safety? Of course, back then I knew absolutely nothing about online safety. I mean, like, you know, I didn't really know much about it, but I knew a thing or two about the inter webs and I knew a thing or two about how social media worked and some of the sort of basic risks. And that's what they were back then. I mean, the risks that we encounter now and the online spaces are much greater as opposed to some of the risks that you would have encountered in the in the sort of the late 90s, the early noughties, whenever I was originally starting to talk about online safety. But that sort of turned into, you know, other schools getting in touch and then and about in about 2006 or 2007, I started to do a little bit of research and I wrote my first e-book and it was called How to Beat the Cyber Bully. What a name, How to Beat the Cyber Bully. That was what it was called. This e-book that I wrote back then got like something like fifteen thousand downloads or twenty thousand downloads or whatever it was. I think it's far more now, but it got a lot of traffic and a lot of people started to log on to this sort of basic landing page that I had because it was optimised and people were downloading the e-book. And obviously then I was able to grow my email list. And then what I did was I decided to put a bit of a proposition to people to say, look, would you like to partake or would you like to invite me into your community or into your schools to deliver some workshops on online safety? Then I was focussing really on parents for the most part. You know, very few people were delivering workshops to students at that time and the people that were doing it were doing it really bad. And that's that's it. You know, there were they weren't sort of delivering the messages that young people needed to hear or they were coming at it from an adult's perspective, which, as we know, children and young people know far more about social media than even I do. Right. Let's be honest. You know, they grew up with the platforms. I'm a digital dinosaur for the most part. They're digital natives. So, you know, I really had to, you know, really look at this from the perspective of a young person. And whenever I started to go into schools, make sure that the message that I was delivering wasn't patronising, wasn't condescending, but also was empowering young people to use social media positively and responsibly. And out of that was born the digital ninja, which people called me for many a year with my crazy MADHUR on my big glasses that you guys will remember me turning up to party events and all of those types of things and talking about my journey or whatever it was. So that's kind of really the back story of where it all came from guys.
Wow. Where do we go from here?
I still haven't answered the question. By the way,
we did notice
Well, it was good to see the same.
And what a scene. I mean, that's spanning all the way back to the late 90s, we will let that one slide, but yes, and so online safety is a huge part of everybody's life, whether you're on social media or not, online safety can affect it. You know, companies are trying to do their best by not letting their things get hacked and breaches and things like that. But is there anything actually 100 percent safe?
Wayne
Technology speaking,
apart from crawling into a cave and just living there like it sounds like Melanie is in right now, but.
Leave me alone, I'm happy in my cave.
Technology speaking, no, you know, every platform, every piece of technology, everything that we use on a daily basis, there's always going to be some form of vulnerability. And we have to accept that and we have to be aware of that. I think that's really important. None of us are immune to cybercrime. We're not you know, I have issues with this all the time where we're involved in data breaches or our personal information gets leaked. And you find suddenly that you've been contacted by this ad platform and they're letting you know that there's been a suspicious activity in your account, et cetera, et cetera. So we have to sort of almost start treating this like, you know, we have to take precautions. And that's really important. Just like, you know, you wouldn't leave your front door wide open. You wouldn't sort of, you know, allow strangers into your home. You wouldn't leave personal information lying around your car, you know, for people to look at and be able to see it. You wouldn't leave your laptop and display it. You know, we have to take measures to protect ourselves. The digital world is no different. So, you know, basic things like practising good digital hygiene is really important. And, you know, whenever I talk about that, particularly in schools, many people aren't aware of what digital hygiene actually is and what it means. And whenever I do a lot of mentalism in my workshops and how
Mentalism, did you say?
Yes, I used to do a little bit of street magic in a previous life
it's all coming out here, guys. It's all I mean, we're getting a whole new life story.
Some people might know me for that. Actually, that's a long time ago, actually. But the reason for this is I actually was really interested in magic at one point and actually really interested in mentalism, particularly mentalism. And what I decided to do was look for ways that I could integrate that into my workshops, particularly with young people. It's really important whenever you are explaining something that you try to simulate as best you can, and it's difficult to simulate how you can get scammed. It's actually easy to do it online. But it's not very difficult. It's not it's harder to do it in the offline world. It's not easy to do. Right. So what I've done in my workshops is I try to simulate examples of how I could get access to your phone while you're standing right there. So you hand me your smartphone, I ask you a series of questions. We go through a series of number patterns, and then I unlock your phone and you're kind of standing there going, how did that even happen? Right. And it's relatively easy to do. It's basic misdirection. It's about really trying to get the participant to disclose information that I need in order to be able to carry out what it is I'm looking to do. And that could be in another case. For example, sometimes I bring up people and will ask them a series of questions in order to try and work out their email password or what the answers to their security questions might be. The reality of this is this
Jesus, really?
The reality of this is I only need to get to two out of three. Right. To lock you out of your email account. And I start to build the picture from there on in. Right. So people are like, how did you do that? And we do that in a live environment. It absolutely blows people's minds because they're like, how did he even do that? Right. So we do some of that ready to try and simulate the distraction aspect of technology, because whenever you're chatting to somebody on Instagram or Facebook or any other platform for that matter, you don't know who that person is behind the screen. You actually don't know what information they already have access to. And for the most part, they've got access to a lot of information. And many people fall victim of all of this because they start accepting friend requests from people they don't know and they're not aware that there's so many data points out there are available on all of us that if you can get access to the data points, then you can build a pretty good picture of who someone is, the types of things they're like, the things that make them tick, where they like to go with the weekend, what music they're into, what football team they follow, where they went on holiday last year, et cetera, et cetera, because it's all available across the social media Web, right? It's all out there. So this sort of this technique that cyber criminals deploy in terms of social engineering is relatively easy done. And it's not complex. It's you're not setting, you know what, some genius cyber criminal for the most part. It's quite basic stuff that these these individuals are deploying. And what they're doing is they're trying to extract information about you that they can use for their own personal gain or they can use for some sort of criminal activity. So there are, of course, things people can do, set up your two step verification. Be careful about the information that you're posting and sharing online. Don't accept friend requests from people you don't know when the real world. Firstly, remember that everything you see in the online space is mostly too good to be true, then it often is, you know, simple stuff like that. But many people fall victim to this because they click on links things that, win a free iPhone, for example, we see these competitions, win a free trip to X, Y and Z, whatever it is like on the run up to Christmas, you're never done with seeing claim your free shopping voucher for As'ad. Popular Irish supermarket. Right. Or international supermarkets popping up on social media all the time. Twenty five pound voucher people click on it. It's off to the scam page. And suddenly and your your personal details are compromised because you've been taken to a page. The page says, oh, we notify we've noticed suspicious activity on your said social media account. Please update your password now. And you're like, oh, God, what happened? You log in, cyber criminals capture your details and off they go and lock you out of your accounts and use that information, then it's allowed. So that's kind of how it all happens. But there are, of course, loads of things that people can do. I always say to people, first thing, set up your two step verification. Be aware of what information is out there in the first instance.
Wow. Wow. I think think I can speak for all our listeners when we're we're sort of going. Oh, dear, no, no, no, we're all off to set up our two step verification. I mean, I have a lot of mine set on
I do have two step
Yeah, I do. But it annoys me from time to time because you're like, yeah, it gets me. I know it's me. But whenever you're saying, you know, simple things like those questions, you know the answers to the questions and you sort of think, oh, I'll pick the most random one that nobody will ever know. But then you don't remember the answer to it. I don't change it. You know, name of your first pet.
That's that's the easy stuff. Always write your own question. Never, ever use the questions that they prompt you to use, because those are the really easy ones that somebody like me who or somebody who's looking to get that information and a in a real world situation will know what was your first pet. That's a really easy question to build into a conversation for somebody to disclose that information equally while primary school that you go to. What was your favourite football team? Where did your parents first meet? This sort of stuff is like relatively easy to to build into a conversation, to be able to extract that information. And you only need to get two out of the three bits of information. Right, to be able to reset the password. Also two step verification is not without its flaws either, because there are things like SIM swaps. Jack Dorsey was one of the the individuals who had was locked out of his own Twitter account due to the SIM swap that cyber criminals were able to deploy and swap his number onto another SIM card, reset the two step verification and lock them out of his account. You know, if it can happen to him what hope is for the rest of us?
Yeah. OK, so what I'm going to bring up a topic that Melanie absolutely hates because it conflicts with her birthday. But what use then is GDPR when it comes to that? Because that's all about protecting your data, right?
Well, it's for the most part, it's really all. Yeah, yes and no. It's for the most part, it's concerned about, you know, and again, I'm no GDPR expert, but for the most part, it is concerned with how your data is being used by a lot of these companies, making sure that your data is being handled and processed correctly, also in and around data breaches and that type of stuff. If there is a data breach, you have to notify those types of things. You know, that's, you know, GDPR, I don't think has made much of a difference to the world of the cyber criminals because there's not much data out there at this point that really, you know, the genie is out of the bottle. Right. What we need to start doing is moving forward. I think this is my opinion, being aware of what data is out there and managing where that data is and how it's being used, then making sure that we layer as much security on top of that on each of the individual platforms that we use if we use PayPal or Amazon or any of these online e-commerce outlets like to be fair to them, they do take steps to make sure that you have these features in place to secure your account. And most people, in fact, about 60 percent of people don't actually have any of these features turned on on their account. I mean, I'm just talking of a two factor authentication here right now. There is a third factor authentication. There is authentication apps that you can use on your phone if you don't want to use two factor authentication. I mean, there are other things that you can do to secure your kind up. You can buy an access key that you plug into your physical device where you verify yourself with a fingerprint in the form of a biometric, so there are other things that you can do. And again, it's just like beefing up the security in your house. Some people have really terrible security where the criminals can get in really easy. Other people invest in an alarm, other people invest in cameras in their house and blah, blah, blah. It makes it more difficult for the criminal to be, you know, and that's the thing, cyber criminals are looking for really easy, low hanging fruit. And I think it's a little bit more work and they're probably going to move on. There's plenty of people out there that are going to be victim to this type of stuff.
I ask you something completely unrelated to everything we've said in the last 17 and a half minutes.
Not that we're counting.
Could you tell us about. Birdseed.
Yeah, yeah. Go and go on completely off that topic coming on to birdseed. That is, I suppose, one of my more recent ventures. Yeah, actually not my most recent venture, but one of my more recent ventures into the world of selling wild Irish bird seed. And a friend of mine approached me about about two years ago now. And he had this idea for this. He had concocted this recipe that birds love. And I've been testing it out in his garden. And he said to me, look, I think there's Magennis. How about you and me set something up? And you know, you know, when you're in the entrepreneurial space, people come to you with these ideas all the time and you have to be very careful because this could be some sort of harebrained bird idea that just may not go anywhere. But, you know, it did actually. I decided to get involved in the business. We set up a very basic website. We just launched our new website recently, which we're really proud of and really excited. It's a complete overhaul. And we now sell this wild Irish birdseed up and down Ireland and right across the U.K. And it is it's very unique. And it's it's not like your birds seeds that you would buy in your pet shop comes in a really nice kits. It's it's got, you know, some really key ingredients in it that robins and finches and blue. It's like I'm learning all about this myself. I'm not some self-proclaimed bird spotting expert. I would even struggle to tell you what some of these birds look like or how to identify them. But my my partner in this venture, Mark Gibbon's, knows all about them. And we we've successfully brought out a couple of other products. We have a candle renge out at the moment where we have a candle, which is the scent of one of the local pot, ClearOne Park here and Ostrava. Esther, which you'll know about. We have a candle, we have a kitchen tin, we have a travel tin and we have just a new product at the moment called Nature Seed I get that wrong. But that's a seed. No, that finches love as well. And we're selling that and we're selling this all online. It's completely e-commerce. You know, we don't stock it anywhere. We're trying to get it into one or two places at the moment. But for the most part, people are buying it through the website. And it's something for me, it's completely random and completely left field, but something that I absolutely, really enjoy.
Can I ask you something regarding these two polar opposite businesses that you run? OK, I don't know if you notice the podcast name is called the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast, so I thought I'd bring up the part of the conversation. How do you market such diversely directly opposing things? And obviously you're still weighing down the entrepreneur. So how how have you managed that's what's been your secret sauce.?
Well, the secret to all of this, I find is is clearly, you know, identifying what it is you're marketing in the first instance and clearly identifying the customer personas that are going to buy these types of things off me, whether it's birdseed and gibbons' and jack dotcom website or whether it's people who are looking to buy the online safety aspect of what it is I do when it comes to the cyber security, the training and the work in schools and those types of places. So it is about having those clearly defined audiences, which is really important, but also having those clearly defined customer personas and really understanding who are the customers that are going to buy those products or services and then shipping a content strategy in and around that. Right. So making sure that the content that's going out is relevant to the target audiences that we're trying to reach. In the case of my online safety stuff, for the most part, it's parents and teachers and schools that I'm getting those messages out to. But increasingly now it's starting to be much more businesses that are knowing how can I protect my business? How do I set up two step verification within my organisation? So I'm now starting to produce a lot of content, Melanie. Which has a B2B spin on it as well. From the online safety point of view, the Gibbon's and Jack is very much a lighter, a lighter offering, some cases it's easier to do because people have this association with nature and the outdoors and with lockdown in particular, that has really catapulted that business because more people are spending time in their gardens, more people are spending time out with nature, and that product in particular comes in a handy travel pack that you can bring with you that if you hold out, the birds will fly down onto your hand and take the seed off the little tin when it comes in. So we're very much focussed on marketing that to people who want to spend time in the outdoors and really want to spend time in the garden, but also want to focus on product, a product that is good for the bird. Right. And that's the thing. A lot of bird seed out there is full of stuff that is not ideal for birds. This is an ideal ingredient for them to be eating. It's also coming in biodegradable and recyclable packaging, which is our big thing. Nothing is plastic at all. Anything that we have there is following fully biodegradable and fully recyclable. And that's our big thing within our marketing as well, that we're sustainable and those types of things. So from a marketing perspective, that's kind of the way we approach that and how we're trying to do that. It's still very early days for Gibbons and Jack, the online safety stuff I've gotten much more refined in terms of items move that no onto. Yes, I still market through Facebook and Twitter and those sites, but most of my content now is through paid subscription portal that you get through the Coppabella. If you want to get access to my videos now, you get access to that for a monthly subscription, just like you would with Spotify or Netflix or any that type of stuff.
OK, so the secret sauce is really understanding who you're targeting it towards and building a full appreciation of the areas, the platforms that are going to be on obviously first and the language they're speaking and you know how you can relate and connect with them through your posts or videos or however you reach them. What is your preferred platform? And do you like because you do talk a lot, but you also do videos as well. So what is your preferred platform? Were you a writer, Wayne?
Not really a writer actually, I'm quite horrible at writing stuff, actually have to be honest. And, you know, anything that I do attempt to write for the most part, and even when I wrote my book, are in two thousand and five fifteen, actually, the students go to an epic online reputation. That was my first attempt at writing a book which is out there now. It's available on Amazon for people to buy it. But even that was incredibly tedious and incredibly stressful. And if it wasn't for other people around me helping that get get that over the line, it would never have got over the line. I'm more comfortable with doing videos, you know, and jumping on and doing a quick little video, quick piece to camera, how to video and then kind of edit it not together really quickly and pushing it out through Facebook, for example. This is really where I'm getting most of my reach at the moment. LinkedIn as well, really focussing now on the B2B content. And that's really about knowing your audience and what they want from you. And here's a really interesting statistic or piece of information for your audience. People on LinkedIn don't give a hoot about my online safety content. They don't like it. I think that's the point. I think so. Right. And hear me out on this. Right. And this is really interesting. This comes from analysing what's working and what's not working. Whenever I put an online safety video on Facebook, for the most part, it crashes are on LinkedIn, sorry, it crashes and it burns a couple of hundred people. Look at it. That's about it, right? No, no big shakes. Right. But whenever I put a video on Facebook that's geared towards online safety and parents, loads of people look at it. Right, gets great traffic. It works really well. LinkedIn is completely the opposite. However, if I put out a piece of content that is geared more towards businesses and how they can protect themselves from being victims of cybercrime, then it's a different game for me. Right? People will look at it and people will watch it. It gets much more engagement, even though those same people guess what? Our parents. That's what you would think it would be, probably. And that's why I always say to people from a content marketing point where you have to be really careful that you understand the platform. If you're just churning out the same video across all platforms, it ain't going to work. You've got to adapt your strategy to look really at the content that the users on that platform want from you. LinkedIn from from my point of view, those people want B2B content. They want to know things that's going to help protect our business. They couldn't give a monkey's about Snapchat app and how that's going to impact, you know, online safety. And I might I'm not trying to paint everybody the same brush. Yes, some people will get it and go, yeah, that's really interesting. I didn't know about that for the most part on LinkedIn for me, it's the opposite. I got to be doing B2B content, something that's going to help your business, keep your business safe, help you avoid a cyber crime, whatever it is, blah, blah, blah. That's what will work really well. Facebook, on the other hand, perfect for those other videos when it comes to reaching parents, schools, teachers, that type of stuff. You could do it all day long. Works really well for me
You know, in my marketing mind. I could just picture you in a bird outfit sucking seeds at people. How do you market your Bird seeds?
Same ort of way actually, in fact, the bird seed does quite well on LinkedIn, for example.
Really?
Yeah, we and this is where we try to sort of be a Twitter. Ah, it's, it's bizarre. And I only know these things from, from doing it myself. Right. And that's the great thing about the world that we live in, in the world that we work in. Right. A lot of this stuff is by by accident, our trial and our testing something and go, you know what, that works or that didn't work. I need to do something, something else. So what I would say to people listening in to the podcast, it's all about experimenting. That is the key. Find out what works and what doesn't work. If it's working, do more of it.
Brilliant, Wayne. I think you've given us so much information and I know we've gone over what we the time that we would usually give, but I don't think anybody will mind. And if
We'll make this part one, part two,
I might have to
I know right?.
It was brilliant. Thank you so much for for giving us your time today and for talking us through online safety, birdseed and marketing in general across different platforms. It's been it's been brilliant. That's it for today, guys. we will be back next week with more Monday morning marketing podcast untill then, bye .